Thanks.

I know this is a stale post but having just come across this problem myself
it looks as if Timeline doesn't like any kind of precision with dates pre
100CE.

So an event with

start="Jan 1 0099 09:00:00 GMT"  

won't be displayed. But the same event with

start="99"  or start="99 AD"

will show up fine.

Just having the year is accurate enough for the timeline I'm working on
(also involving Romans...) so I've not investigated any further, but hope
that helps.

s.

Time formats are a common problem to deal with. There are all kinds of problems dealing with ambiguities in non-standardized date formats, and many edge cases to consider. Browsers implement javascript date handlers in different ways. Most support RFC2822 / IETF date syntax:
"Mon, Dec 25 1995" or "25 Dec 1995" or "December 25, 1995".

RFC2822 allows assumptions about values (eg year is 'any numeric year 1900 or later') and specified (now obsolete) two digit years in the date field, and alphabetic time zone codes.

Web browsers try to be very forgiving in what they accept and parse as date/time strings, even if the string isn't exactly valid, the browser will take its best guess.

Many javascript date handling libraries will assume "0099" means the same as "99" and assume that is a two-digit abbreviation of 1999.

ISO8601 is another date format that is used, but native support in browsers varies across versions. Timeline supports it's own iso8601 parse routines.

Thus, the iso8601 format of this date would be:
"0099-01-01T09:00:00Z"

Timeline parses this correctly. You need to make sure that you specify 'dateTimeFormat': 'iso8601' in your date json. This will tell timeline to use the iso8601 date parser instead of the default gregorian parser.

var j = new Date();
Timeline.DateTime.setIso8601(j,"0099-01-01T09:00:00Z");
-> Date {Thu Jan 01 0099 04:00:00 GMT-0500 (EST)}

--Mike

On Nov 13, 2012, at 9:29 AM, Stephen Cooper wrote: